Waking up in Vegas: Remembering those who suffered from UFC 151's vanishing act

At about 10 o’clock on Saturday night the depression started to settle in. I flopped down on the couch and flipped through one hopeless channel after another. If UFC 151 was still on, I told myself, the main event would probably be just about to start. Jon Jones would probably be on his way down to the cage right now. In the alternate universe of best-laid plans, Dan Henderson would already be there waiting for him.

Instead, I had college football highlight shows and old episodes of “Wings” and some show about events that would have seriously altered the course of history had they actually happened, which they didn’t. I’d already missed the best parts of “Unforgiven” on AMC. “Back to the Future III” – without a doubt, among the top two “Back to the Future” movies – was halfway over on one of the movie channels. Even this late, a quick run through the various Showtime iterations netted nothing but movies I didn’t recognize featuring people still wearing all their clothes. Like I said, depressing.

“So this is life without MMA,” I thought. This is what happens when the UFC puts a big Gone Fishin’ sign in the window and leaves us to our own devices on a Saturday night.

Really, I had no right to complain. I’d had a pretty good little Saturday. Some friends came over. We ate snacks and drank beer while watching the University of Montana beat up on South Dakota (go Griz). But then they went home and a void opened up just as the pay-per-view magic hour rolled around. Now what?

“When you think you have it bad,” my mother used to tell me, “just think of all the people who have it worse.” When I was a kid this struck me as an odd path to happiness, but now it almost made sense. Things could have been so much worse. Instead of being stuck at home with no MMA to watch, I could have been stuck in Las Vegas. Several people I’d talked to actually were, and I did not envy their situation.

For instance, take Duncan Price, who flew all the way from London for UFC 151. As he told me via email on Saturday, he and his wife booked their travel weeks in advance, hoping to build an American holiday around a UFC title fight in the neon heart of the Vegas strip. With their airfare and hotel rooms already booked, canceling the trip once UFC 151 was called off really wasn’t an option, said Price, who also writes about MMA on the U.K. website Brits and Pieces.

“This is our only holiday this year and the travel company would not have changed our tickets, even if our work schedules had allowed it,” he said. “Luckily, we love Vegas, itself, and so the loss of the UFC was only extremely frustrating rather than absolutely crucial.”

For Price and his wife, the UFC’s holiday weekend cards in Vegas are something of a ritual. They’ve attended one in each of the last four years, but this time around the more than $3,000 they spent on airfare and hotel accommodations landed them in a UFC-less city after more than 5,000 miles of flying. And here I thought I was depressed in the comfort of my own home. If I were Price, I might be all the way pissed off by now.

“Overall I’d say [I’m] disappointed,” he said. “This was going to be a great week of sights and shows capped off by a great fight weekend. Now, literally nothing. The UFC even had the cheek to send out an e-mail entitled ’15 things to do without UFC 151,’ which to be honest felt like a bit of a slap in the face.”

Once I checked it out, I had to admit that the ’15 things’ listed on the UFC website included a couple legitimately interesting options, such as meeting Randy Couture at a Vegas autograph signing and catching a Sunday night Tuff-N-Uff at South Point Casino. But then, it also offered suggestions such as watching old episodes of “The Ultimate Fighter” online and checking out Jon Jones’ YouTube channel. So yeah, if you flew halfway across the globe only to have the company you wanted to give your money to tell you to sit around and watch the Internet instead, you might be a little irked too.

Unless, of course, you planned to get drunk in the sports book at the Bellagio instead. That’s what Blake Savage was doing when I talked to him on Saturday afternoon, and he actually didn’t seem to be having too bad a time. Savage (not his real name; he’s a sports handicapper as a side venture and doesn’t want angry gamblers seeking him out to answer for bad betting advice) flew in from Kansas City with friends who were all as eager to bet on Jones as they were to watch him fight.

Ticketmaster automatically refunded the price of their UFC tickets, but they were stuck with the airfare and hotel itinerary and figured they might as well make a weekend of it. Plus, Savage said, they could put the money they were planning to bet on UFC fights toward some college football action.

“We all have pretty decent jobs, and we all gamble probably way more than we should, but we were all going to put money on Jones tonight at, I think the last closing odds were like -650,” said Savage. “I’ve been betting whatever his money line is for the last few fights and he hasn’t steered me wrong yet. We almost take trips to Vegas around Jon Jones’ fights because it’s almost like free money. He’s just so incredibly talented.”

Without Jones to bet on, Savage said, he’d put his money down on Alabama to beat Michigan. It seemed just as sure a bet, he explained, even if watching the Crimson Tide run up the score wasn’t quite as fun as watching Jones vs. Henderson would have been.

And yet, he too seemed not quite as upset as I expected. Sure, he said, he was “definitely pissed off” to have come all this way with no fight to go to on Saturday night, but, he added, “there’s worse places to be stuck for the weekend. It’s not like I flew to Columbus, Ohio for a fight that didn’t happen.”

But it’s not just fans who found themselves stuck in Vegas. Shu Hirata, who represents UFC fighter Takeya Mizugaki, was also left with a non-refundable airline ticket after the event cancellation. Mizugaki could safely stay home without thinking about the money he lost on the ticket, since his travel was covered by the UFC. Hirata’s wasn’t, however, and the same was true for two of Mizugaki’s cornermen, he said.

“We all had tickets, and we couldn’t cancel any of them. So we decided to just come here and have a vacation,” Hirata said.

So they did the Vegas thing. They went on a tour, took in a show on Friday night – Cirque du Soleil’s “O” – but were at a loss for how to fill a fight-less Saturday night since, as Hirata explained, “five days in Vegas with nothing to do is kind of hard.”

The financial impact was also hard on his client, who was scheduled to face Jeff Hougland at UFC 151. Mizugaki hasn’t fought since the February event in Tokyo. With his bout now rescheduled for the UFC on FUEL TV 6 event in November, Hirata said, he likely wouldn’t get another fight before the end of the year.

“He’s going to end up fighting only twice in 2012,” Hirata said. “That’s a huge blow in terms of finances. For guys who are making about [$30,000 per fight], to lose one fight is like losing a third of your income.”

Fortunately for Mizugaki, two of his sponsors – Fear The Fighter and Alienware – paid him his sponsorship fee anyway, according to Hirata. As for the psychological impact of the cancellation, Mizugaki dealt with that in his own way.

“He only complained about it for one day,” Hirata said. “The second day he was already past it, already talking about how he was going to do his camp differently this time.”

But as Saturday night rolled around and the reality of the fight card that wasn’t began to set in, the question of blame still hovered over this gap in the MMA schedule. Whether you found yourself alone on the couch or downing Coronas in a Vegas sports book, surely you had to consider who was responsible for this mess, right?

“Blame is tricky,” said Price. “I’ve lost a lot of respect for Jones. He could have saved the event and he didn’t – end of story. Whenever he fights, I’m now supporting the other guy.”

At the same time, the British MMA enthusiast and the American gambler both agreed that there was plenty of blame to go around in this situation.

“It’s shared between Jones, because he didn’t take a fight that he almost definitely would have won anyway, but at the same time the blame lies with the UFC for booking a card that was so heavily reliant on one fight,” said Savage.

The way Price saw it, “The UFC knew they were going to get [pay-per-view] buys based on the main event, so they watered down the rest of the card to almost unbelievable lengths. There was no way Jake Ellenberger vs. Jay Heiron could have carried a [pay-per-view] and it’s debatable whether Ellenberger vs. Josh Koscheck could have. We’ll never know.”

And how about all the other fans who bought plane tickets and booked hotel rooms, who found themselves faced with the choice between taking a Vegas vacation devoid of UFC action or else eating the cost and staying home to entertain themselves after their big weekend plans had been yanked out from under them? What are those people going to do the next time there’s a UFC event they’re thinking of flying out for? We don’t know that either.

Put yourself in their situation. Say you’ve already been burned once. Say you still want to see a UFC event, and you have the arrangements all queued up and ready to go on your computer screen. What’s going to happen when your finger hovers over the mouse before making that one last click that will whisk away your credit card info?

Before UFC 151, I would have told you not to sweat it, to go ahead and make that click and enjoy the show. Now I’m not sure what to say, except that it probably won’t happen again. I just wonder, for those who might be spending thousands of dollars to fly thousands of miles, whether probably is good enough.